Posts in the [ Templates/Assets ] Category

This is a fun time of the year and Cara, a new TLC staff designer, developed this fun Halloween themed template.

This is a FREE download, full featured PowerPoint template with all standard layouts customized to theme, custom color scheme, custom transitions, and more. Have fun using this template from TLC Creative Services!

Here is one of our favorite visual tricks at TLC Creative Services for making slides with a key quote stand out. Background fill!

I am doing this as a 3-post series: this one shows the end result (see above) and PowerPoint formatting, the next post will detail our development process in Adobe Illustrator, and the third will show a PowerPoint only development process for the graphics. Thanks to Amber, a TLC staff designer, for creating the sample images for this series.

Using the quote mark .emf graphics, they are not very impressive without some styling applied and a special option for their fill color. Insert the .emf graphic (download here).
1. Right click on a quote mark and select FORMAT SHAPE.

2. Go to FILL and select SLIDE BACKGROUND FILL

3. The Quote marks will disappear on the slide because they are set to be the same background color as the slide.

4. Add a shadow effect, bevel, outline, glow or other styling effects to your quote marks. For ours, we have added a subtle drop shadow.

5. Still not super dynamic, but the quote marks are looking more styled.

6. But when placed on a colorful image background – dynamic! Move the quote mark graphics to any part of the slide and their fill updates.

Note: The slide background needs to be set with the Background Fill, not an image on the slide for this effect to work.

Download this Halloween themed PowerPoint template from us, for free! Optimized for PowerPoint 2007-2013, 16×9 aspect ratio and all of the customizable options preset for a ready to use Halloween slide show!

Thanks to Christie, new to the design team, for her design efforts in developing this template.

Earlier this week, a post released a copy of our internal PowerPoint Video test slides. It was drawn to my attention that there were 2 errors in the slides (1. the .avi was not set to play automatic like all others, 2. the .mpg1 was a really badly rendered video). Thank you for the those that sent emails!

The original post’s download link has been updated with a revised version of the PowerPoint Video Test Toolkit and here is same link:
Download here.

The incredibly talented coder, Chirag, quickly put together (in his words) “a very simple and small utility… that toggles the (regedit) setting when you execute it. When it states that sprite clipping is disabled, you get smooth animations. Ensure that PowerPoint is not running when you execute this utility.”

A stroke and an outline are the same thing, but called different things based on the program being used. It is a line around the perimeter. The line can be any color, even a gradient of colors and any width. But PowerPoint has a flaw in its outline/stroke feature:

When you apply strokes to shapes in Illustrator or Photoshop, you have the option to align the stroke to the outside, inside, or center of the shape:

In PowerPoint, the stroke is automatically applied to the center of a PowerPoint, or vector, shape:

However, with inserted images, the stroke gets applied to the outside:

And for text, the stroke is applied to the center:

This makes it difficult if you are trying to align shapes with images, the strokes don’t align even if they are the same weight simply because PPT aligns to the edge of the shape/image and now the same size elements with the same width stroke are different sizes, because on one the stroke makes the shape wider than the other. With the text, the actual text starts to disappear (above example is the base text and then a 10pt stroke applied – which almost completely eliminates the black text). There is not a solution for PowerPoint as of PPT 2013, but we can hope for user control over the placement (inside-outside-center) by the designer to improve PowerPoint.